Leela Corman

Leela Corman is an American cartoonist and illustrator. Corman created the 2012 graphic novel Unterzakhn, which follows the lives of Jewish twin sisters growing up in the tenements of Manahttan's Lower East Side at the turn of the last century. Unterzakhn was published by Schocken Books and nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Eisner Award, and Le Prix Artemisia. Portions of Unterzakhn were serialized in HEEB magazine and Lilith magazine.

Early life and college years Corman was born in 1972 in Massachusetts. Her father's side of the family is Russian Jewish, while her mother's side is Jewish from Poland. Corman's grandfather lost several family members in the Holocaust. Corman became interested in comics at the age of 13 and went on to study painting, printmaking, and illustration at the Massachusetts College of Art, She self-published three issues of the minicomic, Flimflam, while still in college, and won a 1999 Xeric Grant for the graphic novel Queen’s Day.

Career Corman's illustrations have appeared on album covers and for PBS, The New York Times, and BUST Magazine. Corman also has other short comic publications in Nautilus Magazine, The Nib, Tablet Magazine, Symbolia, and The OC Weekly. She teaches at the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) in Gainesville, Florida, a low-cost school for comic arts and at the University of Florida. She was also an adjunct professor at the University of Florida's College of Fine Arts and a founding instructor at Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville. Later, she became a faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design. Corman remains an online teacher at SAW.

Corman has also worked on album covers, having illustrated the covers for Beat the Champ and Goths by The Mountain Goats.

Corman has had works published in the US, as well as Portugal, Spain, and France. She describes her creative process as going between thumb-nailing and writing and relies a lot on the experiences of her Jewish family for inspiration.

Unterzakhn Unterzakhn is Corman's second graphic novel and uses simplistic black and white drawings to illustrate the lives of twin Jewish girls in the turn of the last century on the Lower East Side.

Personal life Corman is married to fellow cartoonist (and SAW faculty member) Tom Hart. Corman met Hart in Gainesville, Florida, where they currently reside and he was also a co-founder of the Sequential Artists Workshop. Hart's book Rosalie Lightning (St. Martin's Press, 2016) is named after their daughter, who died suddenly when she was almost two, and is about Hart and Corman's grief and their attempts to make sense of their life afterwards. Corman addressed the loss of her loss of the child in her work, “PTSD: The Wound That Never Heals”, published by Nautilus Magazine. She credited her work to being a type of exposure therapy. and Le Prix Artemisia in France.